I’m a wee tardy and a tad short with this review for
two reasons. My wife Mary and I spent a weekend away from meetings and the
Internet on a trip to Ames, Iowa where an old friend married a new friend.

And, though I am four years in to retirement, I found
myself once more filing a grievance at the Kansas City Area Transportation
Authority. That was in response to being told at open enrollment that Medicare
eligible retirees will no longer be allowed to participate in the ATA’s group
health care–even though we pay the full cost of the plan. I vented about this in
a blog.

Good News–Only Half Feeling
Stress
NBC Nightly News discussed stress this evening with their medical editor.
It seems half of Americans complain of heightened stress in their lives, a third
describing the feeling as extreme. Anger, anxiety, depression, headaches, and
insomnia are among the symptoms. Social and economic trends fueling stress are
palpable. My question is: what’s the other half doing?

NBC’s in-house MD suggested
walking, talking and breathing therapy. Such things may help. But while each
individual–including me–needs to find ways of coping clearly this stress
epidemic is a social problem, not personal.

In my youth, a social
psychologist, Eric Fromm, wrote a book still worth reading, The Sane Society.
He argued that living under the insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD),
the appropriate designation of the nuclear arms race, frustrated all efforts to
function as a sane society. Were Fromm still writing today perhaps he would
produce a new book, The Stress Society.

Naomi Klein and others have
written about Shock Capitalism. Thousands of foremen and superintendents have
been trained by psychologists in management through stress. Manipulation of mass
stress has become fully integrated in to the system of global capitalism.

That’s why I’ve concluded that
the best outlet for my extreme stress is to work for systemic social change, to
take on the root causes of this epidemic as well as relieving the symptoms. I’ll
try to take more walks, spend quality time talking with my wife, watch the rest
of post-season baseball on television. But, above all, I will summon whatever
energy I still have, for whatever time I have left, for the coming showdown
battles with this Establishment that is trying to stampede us all on to a bridge
to nowhere.

How About Impounding the
Boat?
Laborers President Terry O’Sullivan is one of the more articulate labor
statesmen. He recently said Wall Street financiers should be worrying about
“bail rather than bailout.” But, like virtually all in the Obama camp, he came
to accept the “necessity” of the second bailout deal. Eventually he shrugged and
said, “Unfortunately all Americans are stuck in the same boat with those at
fault and if they sink, they will drag us down with them.”

To my knowledge, no major union
official has suggested that while saving the sinking boat we impound it–instead
of rewarding the criminally negligent boat owners hundreds of billions of
dollars. One of the best takes on the financial crisis I’ve seen yet comes from
a couple of Canadian professors, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. Gindin was a long
time research and strategy director with the UAW, and then CAW, before joining
Pautich on the faculty of York University in Toronto. Gindin wrote some of the
best analysis of both the UAW and CAW surrender deals with the Big Three.

Because they are Canadian, they freely use terms
that most American “progressives” avoid like the plague–above all the “S” word.
The Current Crisis: A Socialist
Perspective, presents an economic
analysis that some readers may find a bit heavy. But they also suggest some
action alternative to the fatalism of brothers O’Sullivan & Co.

They say,

“The scale of the crisis and the
popular outrage today provide a historic opening for the renewal of the kind of
radical politics that advances a systemic alternative to capitalism. It would be
a tragedy if a far more ambitious goal than making financial capital more
prudent did not now come back on the agenda. In terms of immediate reforms and
the mobilizations needed to win them – and given that we are in a situation when
public debt is the only safe debt – this should start with demands for vast
programs to provide for collective services and infrastructures that not only
compensate for those that have atrophied but meet new definitions of basic human
needs and come to terms with today's ecological challenges.”

They continue,

“This would have to involve not
only capital controls in relation to international finance but also controls
over domestic investment, since the point of taking control over finance is to
transform the uses to which it is now put. And it would also require much more
than this in terms of the democratization of both the broader economy and the
state. It is highly significant that the last time the nationalization of the
financial system was seriously raised, at least in the advanced capitalist
countries, was in response to the 1970s crisis by those elements on the left who
recognized that the only way to overcome the contradictions of the Keynesian
welfare state in a positive manner was to take the financial system into public
control.”

A few more words perhaps than I
would have chosen but that’s what I’m talkin’ about. We need to create a vibrant
new public sector by nationalizing the commanding heights of the
economy–finance, energy, transportation–and using it to reorganize a saner, less
stressful, peaceful, and green economy.

¶ Saturday, October 11, Noon-2PM. Back to back
meetings of the Kansas City Labor Partyand Kansas City Labor Against the War.
Mary Erio’s critically acclaimed pasta fazul–batches with and without
meat–will be available to those who feel they can chew and pay attention at the
same time. At 2113 Erie, North Kansas City. For more information call
816-221-3638.